Burned (9 page)

My ancestors’ ghosts walk the castle corridors on the blessed evenings of the feast days of Beltane and Samhain when time is thin and reality liminal—my ancestors who embody duty, loyalty, and honor.

We are the Keltar.

We fight for what’s right.

We protect and honor.

We do not fall.

When the Crimson Hag rips out my guts again and pain burns through me until I am nothing but torment, my flesh on fire with agony, every nerve screaming as my entrails are torn
again
from my ragged abdomen, I struggle to remain alive though this body of mine keeps trying to die because every time I die and consciousness slips away—I lose my Highlands.

Staked to the side of a rocky cliff a thousand feet above a hellish grotto, I breathe deep to smell the heather of my homeland, I run faster to feel the dense spring of grass and moss beneath my feet. I gather roses as I pass between bushes, and bloody hell—there was a thistle in that bunch!

I plunge into the icy waters of the loch, break surface and shake water from my hair. I throw back my head and laugh as Colleen dives in beside me, missing me by inches, drenching me all over again.

Below me, inside me, there’s a pit that’s dark and comforting and quite completely insane. If I sink into it, I can be free of all torture.

But I am Keltar.

I will not fall.

      5      

“We’re building it up to tear it all down”

MAC

“You told them
what
?” Incredulous, I pace the rug in front of the gas fireplace in the rear sitting area of Barrons Books & Baubles, which is really Mac’s B&B, but my name on the hand-painted shingle doesn’t carry the same cachet. I turn and pace the other way. After what happened this afternoon, my nerves are raw. I can’t deal with this. Not now.

He gives me a look. I feel it stabbing between my shoulder blades; the stress of that man’s regard is palpable, even with my back to him.

“Your heels are damaging my rug. It’s an eighty-thousand-dollar rug.”

I say, “You like me in heels. Money doesn’t signify anymore. And at least I’m not burning holes in it.”

Does he smell the blood on my hands? Barrons’s sense of smell is atavistically acute. I showered for an hour after I got
home. I cleaned beneath my nails with a scrub brush until they bled. Yet I feel dirty, stained.

Still, I see the Guardian’s hand, the silver wedding band on his third finger, etched with Celtic infinity knots; a pledge of forever.

I found his wallet. I know his name.

I’ll scream it in nightmares, whisper it in prayers. Mick O’Leary had a wife, a young daughter, and a newborn son.

“A wiser woman wouldn’t remind me of that time. I’m still pissed about it.”

The night Fiona tried to kill me by letting Shades into the bookstore and turning off all the lights seems so long ago. I was reduced to lighting and dropping matches all over one of his sixteenth-century Persian rugs in my desperate bid to survive. The way I feel right now he’s lucky I’m not burning holes in the entire bookstore. The news he just gave me is unacceptable, and I’ve got fifteen minutes to vacate the premises before the event begins. He pretty much just said,
I’ve decided to put you under a microscope in front of all the people who might be able to figure out what’s wrong with you, plus two of the Unseelie princes that turned you Pri-ya. So buck up, little buckaroo
. “Well, I’m not staying here for it,” I say. “You’re on your own with this one, bud.”

Bud
. He looks at me and I remember calling him that the night he showed up at the Clarin House, dwarfing my tiny room with its tiny bed, communal, impossible-to-get-your-turn-in bathroom down the hall, and four crooked hangers in the closet. My suitcase, so carefully packed with pretty outfits and accessories, had found a home in neither closet nor city. I wonder where all those clothes went. I haven’t seen them for a while.

He’d reacted much the same then to my scornful appellation. Few call Barrons anything but “master” and live to tell of it.

Mockery gleams in his dark eyes.
Tread lightly
,
Ms. Lane. The floor upon which you walk is only as solid as the respect you cede it
.

The floor. I get a sudden strange vision that has nothing to do with the
Sinsar Dubh
: me falling forward onto the hardwood planks of my room that night, catching myself with my hands, rolling over and striking the back of my head, hard, and not caring. I was doing something … something that was utterly consuming. I frown. What? Looking at a picture of Alina? Reading a book about Irish history? Folding my clothes? It’s not like I had a lot of fascinating choices in that tiny, cramped room.

How did I fall? Why? And why do I keep thinking about that day?

I have a fragment of a feeling, emotions sprung from an occasion for which I can locate no originating event. Exhilaration. Freedom. Excitement. Shame. Regret.

Normally that would bother me so much I’d go rooting around in my memory, but at the moment I have more pressing issues to deal with.

I shake it off and drop down on the chesterfield, glowering across the room at him. “You seem to have forgotten the small problem I have, Barrons. I’m hiding from all the people you invited here. I have been for months.” The princes I can’t even address. That he’s permitting them in my bookstore offends me beyond expressing. “Why do you want this blasted meeting anyway? And why here?”

He cuts me a hard look.
See Mac cower. See Mac die
.

“Are you trying to piss me off?” I growl.

He gives me the ocular equivalent of a yawn. Only Barrons can pull off such a thing and still look menacing.
It’s not as if there are any repercussions to consider. You wouldn’t kill a scorpion if it was stinging your ass
.

I study my nails. There’s a speck of blood beneath one. I don’t know if it’s Mick O’Leary’s or mine from scrubbing so hard. He’s wrong about that. I look up at him. “You have no idea what I’m dealing with.”

Ah, such as a beast within?
he mocks.

“Your beast is different.” I continue talking aloud, refusing to accept the intimacy of a wordless conversation. We’ve had this argument. We’ll continue having it until the day the king frees me. Neither of us will capitulate. I’m not sure either of us can even spell that word.

Perhaps not so very
.

“Yes, but mine is more powerful,” I say irritably. Powerful enough to fool even me—someone intimately acquainted with its seductive, evil ways.

His dark eyes glitter with challenge.
Care to test that, woman?

The look he gives me sends shivers down my spine, and I feel it slip it into a gentler curve that achieves down-and-dirty doggie-style with sure, supple grace. There is no battlefield I prefer to the one I’ve found in this man’s bed. We fight. It’s what we do. I feel so much more intensely alive around him than I’ve ever felt with anyone else.

I’m obsessed and addicted and ripped-down-raw in love with Jericho Barrons.

Of course, I don’t tell him that. Barrons isn’t a pillow talk man. Sleeping with him, acknowledging our feelings for each other, has changed everything.

And nothing.

In bed, we’re one couple.

Out of bed, we’re another.

In bed, I steal moments of tenderness when sex has finally exhausted me to the point where I’m too bone weary to fret anymore about the enormous capacity for evil that’s taken up squatter’s rights inside me. I touch him, put all those things I don’t say into my hands as I trace the red and black tattoos on his skin, the sharp planes and hollows of his face, bury my hands in his dark hair. He watches me in silence when I do, eyes dark, unfathomable.

I sometimes wake up to find he’s pulled me close to him and is holding me, spooned into my back with his face in my hair, and those hands that don’t speak like mine don’t speak move over my skin and tell me I’m cherished, honored, seen.

Out of bed we’re islands.

Ms. Lane and Barrons.

The first time he retreated into distance, it hurt. I felt rejected.

Until I realized I’d done it, too. It wasn’t just him. Our boundaries seem sewn to our clothes; we can no more put one on without the other than take them off separately.

I sometimes wonder if our passion is so obsessive and enormous that we need distance between the bonfires. I’m a moth to his flame and it frightens me how willingly I’d burn my wings off for him. Destroy the world. Follow him to Hell. It’s scary to feel like you can’t breathe without someone. That a man has so much power over you because you love him as much as, if not more than, you care for yourself.

So I fly away for a while—maybe just to know I can—and he vanishes to do whatever Barrons does for whatever reasons he does it.

I always come back. He does, too. Actions speak.

I shift restlessly and change the subject. “You invite my enemy here. That’s bullshit.”

A Day in the Life
:
You search manuscripts for a spell that may not exist. You paint your nails. You clip your nails. Ah, let us not forget you examine your nails
.

I scowl. “I do more than that. And leave my nails out of this.”

You don’t visit your parents. You don’t go to the abbey. You’re barely eating, and your clothes—

I cut him off by pretending to examine my nails again. This week they alternate black diamond, white ice, black diamond, white ice. The color scheme comforts me, as nothing else in my life is so tidily delineated. I’m acutely aware of the sorry state of my recent outfits and have no desire to hear what he thinks of them. It’s difficult to care when you’re always covered with yellow dust. He’s silent so long I finally glance warily up to find him regarding me with an expression women have been on the receiving end of since time immemorial, as if I’m a species he simply can’t fathom.

Do you think I can’t protect you should you persist with your idiotic passivity?

Idiotic passivity, my ass. As today proved, activity is far more idiotic, and deadly. Is that why he arranged this meeting? To force me to be involved? “Of course not.” I change the subject.

It’s time
. He says his next words aloud and there’s a gentleness to them that undoes me. “You’re not living anymore, Rainbow Girl.”

I melt when he calls me that. There’s something in the way he says those two words that makes it seem he’s said a thousand and they all make me glow. It says he sees the pretty-in-pink
Mac I was when I first arrived, the black, kick-ass Mac I’ve become (unless covered with Unseelie fleas), plus every incarnation in between, and he wants them all.

I
know
I’m not living anymore. No one could be more excruciatingly aware of that fact. It’s driving me bugfuck. Passivity isn’t my nature and I’m choking on it, drowning in it, my balls held firmly hostage by a Book.

I stare up at him and tell him the words I can’t bring myself to say out loud.

I killed the Gray Woman today
.

A corner of his sexy mouth lifts. “Banner fucking day. About time.”

I also killed one of the Guardians
.

“Ah, he got in the way.”

I have no idea what happened. I blacked out
.

A human would be shocked, horrified, demand to know what happened. Barrons’s gaze doesn’t change and he asks no questions. He tallies debits and credits. “You took two lives and saved thousands.”

Bottom line it all you want, the end doesn’t justify the means
, I say silently, pissed that he elevated the conversation I don’t want to be having to a verbal level.

“Debatable.”

I lost control of myself. It took me over and made me kill. Said I’m the car and it’s the driver
. The unspoken words hang like knives in the air anyway, cutting me.

“We train harder.”

I hate mys—

“Never say that.”

“I didn’t,” I mutter. Not technically.

“You are what you are. Find a way to live with it.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Someone told you life was easy. You believed them,” he mocks.

“I just don’t see why they all have to come here. Why not hold this little powwow at Chester’s?” I change the subject swiftly.

Like a verbal dancer, he follows my lead, and I know why: as far as he’s concerned the discussion is over anyway. He has the blood of countless victims on his hands, while I’m having a hard time dealing with one. To him, this day is no different than any other: I’m possessed by a malevolent demon and I sinned. Tomorrow I’ll try again. I might sin again. I might not. But tomorrow always comes. For me and the demon. Despite my screwup, my action will ultimately save countless lives. Barrons has the thousand-yard stare and conscience of an immortal. I’m not there yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be there. I ended a life before its time today. A family man. A
good
man. I must find a way to atone.

“I have wards in my bookstore that neutralize the princes’ power while within my walls,” he reminds me.

“You’re inviting my rapists into my home.” I toss the dual reminder that he wasn’t there to save me the night the Unseelie Princes captured me in the church, and that it’s
my
bookstore, without inflection, still it detonates in the room.

Abruptly the air is so charged with savagery that I feel squished into a corner on the chesterfield. Barrons saturates space when he’s in a good mood—not that I would ever really call any mood Barrons exhibits “good”—but when he’s furious, it’s hard to breathe. He throws off energy, crams the air with intensity and mass, forcing everything else to retract into itself.

“Or have you forgotten that little fact?” I want them dead. I think he should want them dead. I fondle the spear in my thigh sheath lovingly. “We could kill them together.” I snatch my hand away hastily and busy myself plucking imaginary lint from my black Disturbed concert tee-shirt, which I’m wearing not because I’ve been enjoying their music so much but because it’s how I feel. The images the
Sinsar Dubh
threw at me the second I touched my spear were graphically detailed and from this afternoon.